Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the July 1, 1994 Chicago Reader.

Robert Zemeckis, combining his taste for brittle comedy (Used Cars), mutilated bodies (Death Becomes Her), and recycled history (Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit), won an Oscar for this tear-jerking 1994 comedy about a slow-witted southerner (Tom Hanks) living through an absurdist half century of American great events. Zemeckis banks on the innocence of two parties, Gump and the spectator, homogenizing culture and politics into a safe, sweet, palatable nugget. Judging by the the movie’s enduring popularity, the message that stupidity is redemption is clearly what a lot of Americans want to hear. With Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field; Eric Roth and Zemeckis adapted a novel by Winston Groom. PG-13, 142 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 10, 2003). — J.R.

Spike Lee’s best feature since Do the Right Thing. Though none of the major characters is black, it’s one of Lee’s most personal and deeply felt works, and the fact that it’s based on someone else’s material — David Benioff’s adaptation of his novel — makes the film all the more impressive. The narrative follows a former drug dealer (Edward Norton) spending his last 24 hours in Manhattan before beginning a seven-year prison term, though it’s also very much about the people closest to him: his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), two best friends (Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and father (Brian Cox). The film persuades us to think long and hard about what prison means, and Lee has shaped it like a poem that builds into an epic lament, especially in a beautiful and tragic closing that risks absurdity to achieve the sublime. With Anna Paquin. 134 min. (JR)

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From the March 1, 1996 issue of the Chicago Reader. —J.R.

Taxi Driver

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Paul Schrader

With Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Peter Boyle, Leonard Harris, Steven Prince, and Martin Scorsese.

Perhaps the most formally ravishing — as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic — film ever directed by Martin Scorsese, the 1976 Taxi Driver remains a disturbing landmark for the kind of voluptuous doublethink it helped ratify and extend in American movies. Of all Scorsese’s movies, Taxi Driver — being screened this week at the Music Box in a 20th-anniversary “restoration” that’s in stereo for the first time — is for me the most seductive, though I wouldn’t call it either his best film (I’d choose the underrated The King of Comedy) or his most gut-wrenching (I’d pick the overrated Raging Bull). Most of the glamorous depictions of hell on earth and odes to stoical despair about a postapocalyptic civilization found in monuments to capitalist-urban squalor, including Blade Runner and Seven, can be traced back to Taxi Driver, and if it continues to exert an enormous claim on our imagination, this is surely because we continue to live in its vengeful, puritanical fantasies — as well as with the dire consequences of those fantasies. Read more

An “En movimiento” column for Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. This is the original, longer version, before I had to trim it down to suit the magazine’s new design and format — J.R.

It’s logical and inevitable that the meanings of films change over time. After all, we’re the ones who determine, discover, and/or describe those meanings, and it’s obvious that we and our understandings change over time.  At some point during my first decade, I saw a film in which poisoned biscuits played some role in the plot, and during a trip with my parents soon afterwards, I refused to eat biscuits in a hotel restaurant. I’ve subsequently been unable to remember or otherwise pinpoint the title of this film, even after several Google searches, but I’m sure that if I could resee it today, I wouldn’t take it as a practical warning about consuming biscuits.

I’ve had better luck in finding and revisiting another film that upset me during my early childhood. A protracted search in this case eventually yielded The Unfinished Dance (Henry Koster, 1947), which I most likely saw at a revival in my hometown in Alabama circa 1949 or 1950, when I was six or seven, and didn’t see again until over six decades later, after ordering a DVD. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 12, 1993). 

A fascinating and highly entertaining hour-long video (1992) by Dan Bessie about a trio of puppeteers12 who toured America for more than seven decades with their satirical musical revues: Bessie’s 92-year-old uncle, puppeteer Harry Burnett; Burnett’s cousin Forman Brown; and Brown’s lover, Roddy Brandon. (Their LA theater–which counted Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein among its fans–was called the Turnabout because it had a puppet stage at one end, a cabaret stage at the other, and seats that swiveled.) Burnett and Brown, both still alive, perform entertainingly, and we also get fascinating archival footage of some of their shows. Brown, who wrote songs, also talks about his recently republished 1934 novel Better Angel, originally published under a pseudonym, perhaps the only gay novel of its period with a happy ending. A fascinating piece of show-business history, this also offers many interesting comments about what it meant to be gay in the early part of this century. On the same Gay & Lesbian Film Festival program, four short films by Sandi DuBowski, Ruth Scovill, and Iara Lee; one of Lee’s films features Allen Ginsberg narrating, the other features Matt Dillon reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Read more

From the August 29, 2003 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

The Virgin Suicides (2000) revealed writer-director Sofia Coppola to be a genuine original, and now that she’s working with her own material the freshness of her vision is even more apparent. This second feature traces the brief romantic friendship between a jaded movie star and family man (Bill Murray), who’s in Tokyo shooting a whiskey commercial, and a bored young newlywed less than half his age (Scarlett Johansson), who’s waiting for her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) to return from a trip. Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I’m not sure she accomplishes anything else. R, 105 min. (JR)

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From the Chicago Reader (March 16, 1990). — J.R.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Written by Rudolph Wurlitzer

With James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Jason Robards, John Beck, Barry Sullivan, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton, and Chill Wills.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if the film you’re seeing is the one its director intended you to see. Some recent foreign-language releases are cases in point. In fact, if there’s anyone left who takes the Academy Awards seriously — as an indication of a film’s quality rather than its capacity to turn coin — it’s worth pointing out that at least two of the foreign-language features nominated for Oscars aren’t being shown in their original forms in this country. The version of Camille Claudel showing here now is 21 minutes shorter than the original one shown in Europe. This apparently means that the edited-down version — presumably the one that Academy members were shown as well — is worthy of an Oscar while the complete version is not, and the same strictures seem to apply to Cinema Paradiso, opening this week, which has been reduced by about an hour from the two-part version originally shown in Italy, apparently on the assumption that American audiences are more fidgety than their European counterparts. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 17, 1991). — J.R.

SWITCH

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed and written by Blake Edwards

With Ellen Barkin, Jimmy Smits, JoBeth Williams, Lorraine Bracco, Tony Roberts, Perry King, Lysette Anthony, and Victoria Mahoney.

In a review of Blake Edwards’s S.O.B. ten years ago, I was skeptical enough about his reputation as a trenchant social satirist that I called him the Perry Como of slapstick. Stylistically I think the comparison still holds — Switch, Edwards’s latest comedy, bears it out with a grim vengeance — but thematically the description may do Edwards’s work less than full justice. However Hollywood-style and boringly upscale the mid-life crises of the self-regarding womanizers in 10, S.O.B., The Man Who Loved Women, and Skin Deep may be, these are still troubled and neurotic movies; not for nothing did Edwards assign partial script credit to his own psychiatrist in The Man Who Loved Women.

I’m not saying that this element of disturbance makes Edwards a better writer or director, only that it gives him certain characteristics that belie the Perry Como comparison, including a taste for the grotesque and a penchant for self-analysis. Victor/Victoria and That’s Life! show a certain sweetness in dealing with middle-aged characters, and most of Edwards’s movies at least flirt with troubled reflections about sex rather than simply coast along on their Malibu-style furnishings. Read more

From Rouge No. 11, July 2007.

Introduction

Chiefly known as a B film actress who later played a few supporting roles in A pictures at Fox, Carole Landis (1919-1948) appeared in over fifty films. Almost half of these were uncredited before she achieved some recognition in One Million B.C. (Hal Roach, 1940), in which she and her co-star Victor Mature were both cast by D.W. Griffith (who filmed her screen test). She would work again with Mature at Fox in I Wake Up Screaming (a 1941 noir, also co-starring Betty Grable and Laird Cregar) and My Gal Sal (a musical biopic of 1942, also co-starring Rita Hayworth, in which Mature plays Paul Dresser – the popular 1890s composer and older brother of Theodore Dreiser, who started out working in a carnival). A feminist since her youth who tried to start a girls football team at her Wisconsin high school, Landis was born Frances Lillian Mary Ridste, and chose her first name because of her admiration for Carole Lombard. In 1944, she published Four Jills in a Jeep – a book about her first wartime USO tour, entertaining troops in England and North Africa – and appeared as herself in the Fox film derived from it. Read more

From the August 3, 2007 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

KILLER OF SHEEP ****

DIRECTED AND WRITTEN BY CHARLES BURNETT

WITH HENRY GAYLE SANDERS, KAYCEE MOORE, CHARLES BRACY, EUGENE CHERRY, JACK DRUMMOND, AND ANGELA BURNETT

WHEN Opens Fri 8/3

WHERE Music Box, 3733 N. Southport

INFO 773-871-6604

Thanks to the excellent restoration work of the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the patient heroism of Milestone Films’ Dennis Doros — who has spent years acquiring the music rights for a film largely built around pieces of music — Charles Burnett’s monumental first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), is finally getting its first commercial release. Shot by Burnett himself in black-and-white 16-millimeter for less than $10,000 — as his master’s thesis at UCLA — this portrait of everyday life in Watts has steadily grown in resonance and reputation over the past 30 years. It’s centered on the melancholy off time of the title hero  — a weary abattoir worker (the wonderful Henry Gayle Sanders) — with his family and friends. The slow burn and slow drip of this off time while he stews in his own juices is essential to the movie’s experience.

We also catch a few glimpses of the hero at his job, but most of what we know about his work and how he feels about it comes from seeing his general alienation and exhaustion when he’s at home: repairing the kitchen sink or laying out linoleum, sluggishly dancing with his wife in the living room, berating his son for addressing her in a “country” fashion as “dear,” refusing to participate in a robbery being planned by a couple of neighbors, or trying to fix a broken down car. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (February 20, 1998). — J.R.

Scotch Tape

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Jack Smith

With Jerry Sims, Ken Jacobs, and Reese Haire.

Flaming Creatures

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Jack Smith

With Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Judith Malina, Dolores Flores, Marian Zazeela, and Smith.

You’d never imagine this from the mainstream press, but experimental film is on the rise again, as a taste as well as an undertaking — even if it’s often returning in mutated forms like video or in areas of filmmaking where we least expect it. At the Rotterdam International Film Festival three weeks ago, hundreds of Dutch viewers, most of them in their 20s, stormed the largest multiplex in Holland — one of the best-designed facilities I know of, suggesting an unlikely cross between a Borders and a Beaubourg, a mall and an airport — to see work that’s thought to have little or no drawing power in this country. They watched short experimental videos from Berlin, London, and Providence, Rhode Island, at a crowded weekday afternoon program called “City Sounds.” They watched Blue Moon, a charismatic Taiwanese feature by Ko I-cheng whose five reels can be shown in any order (they all feature the same characters and settings, but whether the five plots match up chronologically or as parallel fictional universes — signifying flashbacks, flash-forwards, or variations on a theme — is left to the viewer). Read more